This past year’s mild hurricane season is something many in the Florida, Mississippi and Louisiana are certainly very happy about. But if you are a business in any area of the world, now is not the time to let your guard down.
In today’s day and age, technology has advanced to such a degree that IP communications can minimize the impact of natural disasters on businesses.
In October 2005, ITEXPO held a press conference with the Disaster Planning Communications Forum (DPCF). TMC continues to work with associations and companies to ensure attendees at ITEXPO becomes a major location where attendees can be educated on disaster planning and business continuity.
It should be noted regardless of your company size, disaster planning is something you should be aware of and implement.

It is not too late to book your flights to ITEXPO
I just went to Expedia and checked the airfares for the upcoming Internet Telephony Conference & Expo coming up in a few weeks. Boy was I surprised. I have never seen such low fares just two weeks from any show. And this is with no Saturday night stay requirement.

Many people know how VoIP has changed lives and how it has allowed communications to take place among people who previously could not afford to communicate. Voice over IP is obviously disruptive but at the same time it has changed the world in many ways. We know about cost savings and how service provider business models have evolved over the years but we have not seen enough media attention on how VoIP is changing lives by enabling people who could not previously be employed to finally get jobs.
There are hundreds of thousands of disabled veterans in the world and in these distinguished American citizens are often unable to contribute to the workforce because they aren’t able to commute to a job.
In May of last year I wrote about how call centers are changing lives and specifically about the excellent work Ken Smith is doing as Program Manager at the Military Order of the Purple Heart (MOPH).
Here is a refresher from the above article:
In November of 2005, the Military Order of the Purple Heart Service Foundation or MOPHSF started its first class of 15 disabled, combat wounded veterans in an online call center training program called Veterans Business Training Center or VBTC.

This training was 15-weeks, 600-hours long and focused on the Five9 dialing platform. As it turns out, Five9 gave this agency very favorable rates for their service and they should be commended for doing so.

The foundation allowed the trainees to use this platform to call prospect donors on behalf of the foundation to solicit contributions in the state of Virginia.

One of the fastest growing areas of TMCnet is the channels program which are micro-communities of interest. These channels focus on so many topics I can’t list them all but a few of the more recent ones are here for your perusal. The span virtually every area of communications and they are to me the future of the internet. Why?

Today is a pretty big day for me personally. As you know, TMCnet is the world’s leading site for communications and technology information, community building, etc. In fact this past December 2006 saw our traffic reach just under 2 million unique visitors. Our previous record was just over one million.
This is a number unheard of in the competitive space in which we play and we are proud of this fact.
So while our site is not only successful it continues to shine, we knew it also was a busy site.

I'd like to start this blog entry off by saying Happy New Year and wishing all my readers a tremendous 2007. I hope you are healthy and happy and that your family and all loved ones are as well. Having said that, I cover lots of topics on my blog and many times I focus on telecom and sometimes I get to cover weird stories that are hard to believe
Other times I tie a story into a trade show like the Internet Telephony Conference & Expo (ITEXPO) taking place in 24 days -- January 23-26 at the Ft. Lauderdale Convention Center.
Many times when I write about the show I like to have a hook.

Yesterday I wrote about ensuring net neutrality and just to show you how fluid the telecom market is, today AT&T may have ensured net neutrality for all of us last night. Well at least for 24 months. The company made a number of concessions to the FCC in order to complete their merger with BellSouth. Some of the concessions have to do with freezing prices on enterprise broadband services and giving up wireless spectrum.

I am back at the Eden Roc today but only because all other gyms in the area are closed. The bar at the hotel has Starbucks coffee and the best bar staff around. The gym staff is hit or miss. Today I will miss again.